Obfuscation in general transforms a product to hide implementation details from reverse engineers while providing functional equivalence.
However, obfuscation often negatively impacts performance.
For example, Chakraborty et al. applied their technique HARPOON [1]} to the ISCAS-89 benchmark suite [2]}, which increased area by \(12.44\%\)  and power consumption by \(12.81\%\)  on average.
Since these penalties influence sales, either weak methods are used or no obfuscation is employed at all, with designers arguing that the size of the design makes reversing already infeasible.
Strong obfuscation techniques which can be implemented at negligible costs and with minimal effort could incentivize designers to protect their designs, effectively reducing the amount of information which is plainly available to attackers.
